Bushfire building damage survey - a nsw perspective

Bushfires have damaged or destroyed hundreds of buildings in rural and urban interface areas within NSW for the last decade. These devastating bushfires have taught us many important lessons about bushfire causes and building damage mechanisms. One of these important lessons is that post fire building damage survey is an effective means for studying house damage mechanism and the survey findings can be used to develop better risk assessment models and consequently help us make informed decisions in bushfire risk mitigation planning and development assessment. In recognising the importance of bushfire building damage survey, NSW Rural Fire Service has established a bushfire building damage survey system for collecting, storing, retrieving and researching post bushfire damage survey data. The survey procedure documents when and how to initiate bushfire damage survey. The survey equipment includes laptop computers with GIS functionality, GPS receivers, digital cameras, video cameras and other equipment required for measuring slope and distance. A database has been developed and installed in the laptop computers allowing the survey data to be entered, retrieved and studied. The database captures three kinds of information, that is, general survey information about building and building owner, information required for bushfire attack assessment such as vegetation type, separation distance and slope, and building damage details like degree of damage, building materials of major building components, ignition source and residents behaviour prior to and after fire front pass. The database is not only a survey data storage tool but also an analysing and reporting tool. This paper describes the components of the NSW RFS building damage survey system and the preliminary findings of the survey data collected to date.